On the shopping list:

• Rugged Obsidian 9 suppressor
• Holosun AEMS (but open to recommendations)

Less QQ, more pew pew.

To all of my fellow Jewish gun nuts, I wish you a good fast, and a good day of self-reflection.

I live in the US (Oregon).

I want a gun from Israel, any suggestions on how to get/find it?

I just searched gun broker, didn't find anything in I can get...

(Local gun store) Had one a while back, but I didn't get it when I could have...

One of my favorite rifles, a 10.5” 5.56 with an ACC SDN 762 can, EOTECH 55 something, and my pirate flag.

My Bul Armory Axes ... but I'll be putting Meprolight Pro-F enclosed emitter on them soon. THEN they'll be Jewish enough. :D

Mossberg 88 shotgun, Glock 19, 14.5” AR-15. Plate carrier is an Agilite 🇮🇱 K19 with Agilite accessories and Highcom level 4 plates.

Final Build- Sig P365X Spectre Comp Slide, Wilson Combat XL grip module, GrayGuns adjustable flat trigger, Swapfox Sentinel ultra compact green dot sight. She’s pretty 😍

Picked up this 12 GA and looking for suggestions. I was thinking יכין בועז

Shalom aleichem! What are some good beginner friendly guns? Something someone not very strong/large could fire and doesn’t cost a ton.

Howdy 🤠

Jewish gun owner here.

I am wondering if there is anyone who lives in the Los Angles area? I have been going to the gun range more often post 10/7, and am looking for a potential range buddy. While I dont mind shooting alone, having another person (especially a Tribe member) would be pretty cool.

Most of the best guns are made in America but quite honestly I’d own a German gun. Germans make quality stuff. Personal current fave is the Public Defender. Not good for CC but great for House hold defense

Had a very long and detailed post rejected in a Jewish forum because way at the bottom, it mentioned guns (even noting it was a "taboo subject").

The post was about Jewish self defense in these times were so many of the other posts in the forum were from American Jews who were confessing how scared they were lately.

If ever we needed to at least talk about this.... 😔

Article pasted in below, or read it at the link. Question for any Israelis here: he says you can only buy 100 rounds of ammunition. Is that true? How does that work? How do people get training and practice in? And is it true that you cannot own a rifle?

​

https://www.thefp.com/p/matti-friedman-why-i-got-a-gun?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Matti Friedman: Why I Got a Gun

My Glock is an ugly little monument to the historic threat facing my family, my neighbors, and all of Israel.

By Matti Friedman

April 9, 2024

JERUSALEM — I was recently at an indoor shooting range in Jerusalem watching new gun-license applicants blast paper targets with mixed success—ordinary people, some rotund guys of early middle age, a man in his 60s with the air of a Talmud professor, a young mother who’d been evacuated from the southern town of Sderot after Hamas terrorists killed dozens of her neighbors on October 7, now living in a cramped hotel room in our city with her husband and two kids.

She fired her rounds with particular intensity, or so it seemed to me, though of course even she couldn’t turn back the clock to October 6. When the instructor was done with her, it was my turn.

The counter at the entrance was swarmed three customers deep—the staff have never seen anything like the last six months. One salesman was explaining the advantages of the Israeli Masada pistol, named, unfortunately, for the site of the mass Jewish suicide that ended our previous stretch of sovereignty here in 73 CE. A religious woman in a skirt, her hair covered with a scarf, was trying out a stomach holster that could be concealed under her shirt—she’s a kindergarten teacher and doesn’t want to frighten the children.

The traditional Israeli attitude to guns is often misunderstood, particularly by observers peering through an American lens. Guns are visible everywhere here, and many visitors, startled by the sight of heavily armed young men and young women in uniform carrying M-16s on the bus or at the bar, assume an enthusiasm for weapons and a free approach to acquiring them.

But Israelis have no legal right to bear arms, no fear of government tyranny in the American tradition, and a fraction of the crime fears that Americans accept as normal. (In an ordinary year, Jerusalem, a city of nearly one million residents, tends to see about a dozen violent deaths; in Indianapolis, a slightly smaller city, the homicide number tends to be over 200.)

For the average Israeli, guns are simply a tool for protection against the Arab violence that has shaped this society over the last century. Like the army, they’re a necessary evil. Most of the armed people you’ll see in an Israeli city are soldiers or police. In the United States, according to a Pew study last year, 32 percent of citizens own guns. In Israel, it was under 2 percent.

That was before October 7.

Since the attacks, more than 300,000 Israelis have requested gun permits—twice the total number of people who owned guns before. In the Tel Aviv area, the number of permit requests rose 800 percent. This may be the most visible symptom of the way our sense of safety has been shattered. For me, the change is manifest in the form of a small Glock—an ugly little monument to a change for the worse in this country and in the lives of its citizens.

Though buying a handgun here has become easier, gun ownership is still tightly restricted and involves paperwork beyond the wildest dreams of gun-control advocates in the United States. If you’re cleared for a permit by the Ministry of Internal Security after a background check of your medical and psychological records, and of your military service, and then pass a test that includes firing 100 bullets, you’re licensed to own and carry a single weapon with a serial number registered with the government under your name. You cannot buy another gun. You’re allowed to buy 100 bullets that must be accounted for each time you renew your license. It’s virtually impossible to buy a rifle.

I went through all of this after October 7, but found the real process to be less bureaucratic than psychological. I was trained to use an automatic rifle in the infantry during my mandatory army service, but like all of my friends I was happy to give the thing back. I didn’t believe that lethal force was necessary in civilian life. By the time I filled in the forms after the Hamas attack, with several acquaintances dead and one captive in a Hamas tunnel, my wife, Naama, had stocked our apartment with water, food, and batteries in case the war spread to Jerusalem. Naama can’t even look at the gun. But nightmare scenarios had been proven realistic, and it seemed irresponsible not to take every precaution.

Since October 7, the number of Israelis who have applied for a gun permit is 300,000, writes Matti Friedman in The Free Press

“Since the attacks, more than 300,000 Israelis have requested gun permits,” Matti writes, “twice the total number of people who owned guns before.”

The early Zionist movement sought to create Jews who could fight, but hoped they wouldn’t have to and certainly wouldn’t want to. In contrast with the militarism that some external observers imagine here in Israel, to a large extent this attitude remains officially in place. There are no military parades, for example. The army tends to avoid warlike symbols and language, preferring euphemisms drawn from the natural world—I once served, for example, at a grim firebase in Lebanon called Outpost Pumpkin, where the weapons systems included a radar known as Buttercup and night-vision gear called the Artichoke. When famous Israeli generals like Moshe Dayan were asked their profession, they’d say they were farmers.

The truth is that for the Israeli urban middle class, which has always been identified politically with “the left,” there has always been something déclassé about carrying a handgun. It’s an object associated with what Israelis think of as “the right,” a term that suggests lower-income voters, and also gun-wielding fanatics like Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was appointed the Cabinet minister in charge of police when this government came to power and who has led the drive to arm civilians. (In Israel the terms left and right don’t mean what they mean in the United States and have never had anything to do with gun rights: they chiefly denote differing attitudes toward compromise with Israel’s enemies, and are in fact often related to whether one’s grandparents ran away from Christian Europe or the Islamic world.)

Part of the dynamic around weapons here is one where the middle and upper classes outsource violence to people further down the economic food chain, and then look down on them for it. A more extreme version of this exists in America, where better-off citizens can express disgust with the military or call to “defund the police,” enjoying the perks of a powerful country and safe neighborhoods while pretending their own hands are clean.

For years, we have suffered regular episodes in which Palestinian men go berserk in public places with knives or guns, killing people until they themselves are shot and killed by security forces or an armed civilian. (The most recent instance occurred last week, when a Palestinian stabbed three people at a mall.) But this never translated into gun ownership, certainly not among people I know. We seemed to expect someone else to be on hand to protect us.

Jerusalem, where I live, and where more than one-third of residents are Palestinian, is particularly susceptible—without even consulting the internet, I can think of a dozen such attacks in the last year. And yet, in the panic after October 7, when one of my neighbors in our building’s WhatsApp group asked how many of us owned guns, the answer was none.

This was obviously going to have to change as we absorbed two lessons of the Hamas attack.

The first was that we could not afford any further delusions about the intentions or capabilities of our Palestinian neighbors. These delusions had just led to the deaths of 1,200 Israelis like us, many of whom were murdered in their kitchens and living rooms, and to the kidnapping of 250 more, with enthusiastic support across the Palestinian public.

The second lesson involved our basic assumption that security forces would always arrive fast. The massacres around Gaza occurred barely an hour’s drive from Tel Aviv, but I met a woman from one southern kibbutz who was rescued by Israeli soldiers only 30 hours after the attack began, during which time many of her neighbors were killed or taken hostage. If a half-dozen Hamas pickup trucks were to come out of the Arab neighborhoods a few minutes away from mine and try something similar, we’d be on our own.

It was around this time that my friends began applying for gun permits, including a psychologist, a radio journalist, a specialist in medieval Jewish history, and a professor of Greek philosophy. And it was around this time that I, like other people I know, found myself calculating angles of fire inside my own home. What can I hit from the stairs? Could the front door stop a bullet? Whatever the outcome in the Gaza war, it was clear that we had already suffered some kind of spiritual defeat.

In Israel, guns are less a matter of personal liberty, as in America, than of communal defense—which is logical, I suppose, in a country whose ethos was forged not by frontier individualists but by socialist kibbutzniks. I recently attended a training session for new gun owners from central Israel, one of whom was Doron Ben-Avraham, 60, from the town of El’ad. This town was the scene of a gruesome axe attack by two Palestinians in May 2022, and one of the three people killed was someone he knew. “If I see a neighbor getting attacked, I want to be able to help—I’ll feel sick if I didn’t,” Ben-Avraham said, reflecting what seemed to be the approach of the twenty men in the class. He applied for a gun permit after October 7 and was now the new owner of a Glock-19.

The class was run by a shooting instructor named Boaz, an IDF counterterrorism instructor who asked me not to use his last name. He’s been doing this for 20 years. Amid the general scramble for weapons, Boaz has been surprised to see the number of new gun owners among the ultra-Orthodox, he said, a community that generally holds anti-militarist attitudes and is happy to leave their own defense to others, and also among women. Sure enough, when the first group dispersed and the next one arrived, it turned out to consist of a dozen women in their 30s and 40s. I found them on plastic chairs discussing the upsides of the Sig Sauer. When I asked them about their motivation, the scenario mentioned most often was an invasion of their home by a killer, the stuff of horror films and of Israeli reality circa 2024. The word that recurred in their answers was control.

The decision to expand private gun ownership is certain to have unintended consequences, and not just because the number of guns will mean more accidents, homicides, and armed extremists. At the shooting range where I got my license, it was clear that some of the new owners were hardly competent to use a weapon in the sterile condition of the range, let alone in an actual attack where we would have to make life-or-death decisions in a matter of seconds while beset by adrenaline and fear. Those with combat training have a chance, though no guarantee of success. When I came home with my new license and a Glock 43X, I told my kids that if they’re ever near a shooting attack they need to lie down flat and wait until it’s over—the main danger being less the terrorist than other Israelis who will open fire and hit something other than their target.

One incident in particular has become a case in point. On November 30, two Palestinians from Sur Baher, a Jerusalem neighborhood near mine, began shooting Jews waiting at a bus stop, murdering three of them before a lawyer named Yuval Castelman, who happened to be passing by, jumped out of his car with his handgun. He engaged the terrorists with admirable bravery—only to be mistaken for a terrorist himself and killed by an army reservist exercising something between bad judgment and criminal negligence. Guns solve some problems and create many others. It’s hard to say how we’ll remember all of this in a decade or two.

But even in the weeks of my work on this essay, an Israeli with a handgun managed to kill a terrorist, another Palestinian from Jerusalem, who was shooting innocent people on a road in southern Israel, two of whom died. That was on February 16. On March 14, a noncommissioned officer waiting in line at an Aroma café didn’t notice the Palestinian kid in a black sweatshirt who lunged at his neck with a knife—but did manage to draw his handgun and shoot the assailant, preventing more fatalities, before he bled to death.

A friend from America told me recently that every Jewish person he knows has a contingency plan, sometimes secret or scarcely admitted even to themselves, for where to hide or escape if things get really bad in the diaspora—the kind of thought borne of a good education in Jewish history mixed with a close read of current events, like aggressive protests outside synagogues, shots fired at Jewish schools, and the growing fever about “Zionists.”

Mulling this, I asked friends here in Israel if they had a similar plan. No one did. Zionism has clearly failed to change everything in the Jewish condition, but it seems to have changed that, for what it’s worth. I don’t know anyone preparing a hideout. But I do know a remarkable number of people with a new Glock.

Matti Friedman is a Jerusalem-based columnist for The Free Press. He’s the author of four nonfiction books, including most recently, Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai. Read his Free Press piece “The Wisdom of Hamas,” and listen to his talk with Bari on Honestly about the time Leonard Cohen visited Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Follow him on X u/MattiFriedman.

Originally meant for another sub, submitting it here. The administrators of that sub don't like my terminology "psychotic victimhood" and won't allow it; I want to be clear I do not mean any of this in an ableist way to cast aspersion on people who have been diagnosed with clinical psychosis or any other mental illness. We are united in your struggle against mental illness and de-stigmatizing mental illness. What I do see is a mass psychosis in our community however and whether you call it "psychosis", "insanity" or anything else, it's not going to be uncomfortable to talk about, but it's important that we do.

I identify our people as being in a state of paralysis that I call "psychotic victimhood" - first of all, we ARE victims. We don't deserve anything that's happening to us right now. None. Our only sin is being Jewish, OR being a Jew that is unwilling to turn their back on the only country in the world where we have institutional power - Israel. The country where 50% of the world's Jews live, and if it ever dissolved, a greater percentage of world Jewry would be lost than was lost during the Holocaust. I know I see turning my back on Israel would in effect be endorsing a Holocaust 2.0, except around 15% worse than the first one based on sheer population numbers alone as around 7 million or so Jews live there compared to the 6 million souls that were lost during the Holocaust. It is unfathomable to me how any "compassionate" person would demand this upon a Jew in order to be cast as a "good Jew", but I digress. It is also beyond me why any Jew would comply with this in order to be considered a "good Jew".

So what do we do with this? How do we handle it? The traditional approach has been to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on large organizations to combat hate and educate the public, that while they do have their place and purposes, have not been effective at stemming the tide of antisemitism. In fact, it's grown far far worse as we continue to throw more money at the problem in the name of "education".

Many of us try to then fix ourselves, which is where I see the solution being. They do this by going online to talk with people, and using various forums as unofficial support groups. This also has its place, but is reactive and defensive in nature, and does not safeguard us physically at all. I myself engage in this behavior, both 1:1 with people and in larger groups, on this very forum and in other places. Sometimes in person. I am not poopooing commiserating about our struggles bar none, but rather our addiction to it, in what I refer to as "psychotic victimhood": the collective behavior of us doomscrolling at home, thinking we are "fighting the war" by engaging with Iranian bots on a troll farm on Instagram, or more constructively engaging with other Jews in support online, but that being the end of it. The communal support, I can get behind. But by in itself? No. I can not.

What I do propose to break ourselves out of this state of paralyzing "psychotic victim" is what Imi Lichtenfeld envisioned when he invented Krav Maga on the streets of Bratislava in response to antisemitic attacks, and the rest being history when this style was incorporated into the IDF to train soldiers. Every punch, kick, elbow, and choke you make on your Jewish partner during self defense class is in investment in them, the community, and yourself to safeguard yourself against antisemitic threats, both physical and psychological. For anyone that's ever participated in this type of activity, it truly changes the way you process current events and individual people's verbal aggressions, your worldview, and outlook.

Even better if you live in a place where you can legally own and possess firearms, and are able to train with them. Guns are a huge taboo in our community; the way we say "hello" and "goodbye" also means "peace". This is no accident and I am deeply proud of this cultural value, but it does not mean we are committed to defending ourselves with anything less than the best self defense tools that are legally available to us. We also have a cultural value that suicide is utterly taboo, and in my age I have come to see that suicide is not always by your own hand, but it can be suicide through pacifism.

It's important to hold both values to your heart, of peace and self defense, because our history is unfortunately riddled with evil people that were motivated to self defense out of a genuine love of the Jewish people, but forgot the "peace" part of our culture and descended into evil acts such as terrorism and assassinations. Sometimes of other Jews, like when a Jewish extremist brutally murdered Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 while he had a copy of "Shir L'Shalom" (Song of Peace) in his coat pocket which became bloodied after he was struck down by the terrorist's bullet. I fully consider the person that murdered him to be a traitor to the Jewish people, and ironically he thought he was removing a traitor from power. Kahanism (the ideology of Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense league or JDL, a terrorist organization), which powered this evil person's worldview, and violent aggression in general is a disease, NOT who we are as a people, and NOT a road that any Jew that wishes to remain a Jew should ever go down.

In summation: let's remember who we are, which are NOT violent people. We do NOT want to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors that have descended into evil such as Meir Kahane, the JDL, and its followers, but something major has to change. We can't go along in our state of "psychotic victimhood" forever. I know I couldn't go along like this forever, so I organized a group of Jews to train Krav Maga where I live, and we have been training regularly. I have seen the "nice little Jewish boy and girl" take a backseat in people week by week as they cultivate the righteous aggression necessary to keep themselves and our community safe. I am working hard where I live to organize more people to receive proper gun training from a professional instructor who has combat experience in Israel; anyone that takes 2 weeks of Krav Maga learns very quickly that it goes a long way, it has its place in our toolkit and is great for exercise, fitness, and community, but at the end of the day it's important to learn to utilize the best tools you have. Especially if you're not a 250 lb. muscled man. In the United States of America where it's legal, those tools are guns.

If you can not organize an entire class of Jews, then every person reading this who isn't doing so while working on an offshore oil rig or in the Alaskan tundra can find at least one Jewish friend to join them as a partner for a larger self defense class open to non-Jews, which are available in basically any populated area at this point. I have a preference for "Krav Maga" because with a good instructor it is intentionally quick and dirty and focused on self defense rather than being an "art", but use whatever you have available to you in your locality.

I hope these words have resonated with some of who have read it. For those that haven't I am willing to respectfully engage, but keep in mind if it takes a while to respond it's because unfortunately Reddit does not pay the bills (although I'd love for this to be true).

I truly wish you all well and may we continue to be a "light onto nations", not a source of darkness with Jewish characteristics.